Lesson-Living Transparently 2

This post is part of the series I started in 2017 and feel passionate about. You can read the first part here. I initially titled it Living Transparently, but now I am not so sure the title covers all of the principles I feel strongly about. But I am going to stick with the name for now, because in the center of what I am talking about in these posts, is just being honest and being transparent despite the fears.

In this post I would like to share my current understanding about engaging the emotional resistance and working towards feeling an emotion of fear (fear of something that you are truly terrified of) rather than avoiding it. Maybe this can be of assistance to someone else who is struggling to come to terms with something they have done and not proud of.

I will share a story and use it to draw some examples and the lessons I thought were valuable at the time and during my reflections after.

In January 2016 myself & Igor attended a meeting for God’s Way organisation, where we had an amazing opportunity to discuss in detail the new constitution written by Jesus. (I highly recommend to read this informational document to see if you are drawn to reflect about any parts of your personal life where improvements are needed.) As we read the paragraph after paragraph of inspiring information, I started to feel a sense of dread inside, as I realised that there was something inside of me that was contradicting the level of love in the constitution. This internal conflict was showing me that there was something wrong with the way I was thinking and living my life. Memories started to flow about an event myself & Igor were involved in 6 years prior to this and straight away we both knew we will have to do something about our past actions.

The event, which I speak in detail in the earlier mentioned post, if you interested to checking it out, is about breaking a law and harming other people through supplying them drugs, but what was also a problem that I wanted to cover it up and not be honest about what I have done, to myself or anyone else.

What I realised recently, is how the level of love and truth in God’s Way constitution, has highlighted the contrast in the level of love I had inside of me. It’s now been a year since myself & Igor gone to the police and disclosed our actions from back in 2010, and I still do not understand all of the emotional things that caused me to take such an unloving actions towards others and myself. However, I start to understand how Truth has confronted the untruth and the error inside of me, and I know exactly how that feels now.

The moment of confrontation is not meant to be pretty, but the key is to stay with the resistance and to feel through it. I was sick physically, nauseous, weak in my whole body. I emotionally cycled between the panic, shame, fear, regret about my decisions, and anger which was either about attacking myself & condemning my unloving actions (which could not be changed) or anger that wanted to justify why I did it. I often ran away and shut the whole process down, got distracted, hid away, to have a “break”.

But that was all simply because I resisted to continue being overwhelmed, and I also wanted to force myself to feel happy, like I am ok, like I can be in control of this situation. I use these addictions to get away from feeling my pain, and to get away from just feeling that I hit a roadblock and needed to feel through the “l don’t want to feel any more” part.

The thing about it was, that if I wanted to get through these feelings and feel any better, the engagement had to continue. My friends really helped me along with this, as I often received reminders from them, guidance and care. After initial several weeks of this experience, I started to feel differently and much better and less panicked. I still felt afraid about the decision I made to go forth to police and I didn’t know how emotionally I was going to be able to do that, but I knew my new goal was to emotionally grow into the decision I made. This took another few weeks, and I noticed a change, where I was still afraid but I was very comfortable with my decision. I felt calmer too.

It was now time to write my memories of the event into a statement, a confession. I waited another 6 months before I started to write my statement and a whole lot more emotions came up in the process, which I was avoiding for those 6 months without consciously knowing it. These six month were all about disengaging and procrastinating. That was all about avoiding my fears of being exact and accurate, which the statement called for.

This taught me that not until I start to fully engage whatever emotionally is required to go ahead with a loving action, will I know if I have any emotional issues that conflict with that loving act. What I experienced is that avoiding to deal with these issues, will always lead to pain due to God’s Laws working the compensation on our soul to teach us that delaying what is obviously good and right (disclosing about the harm I caused and looking at the reasons why I did it) is not a good direction to take and will not lead us to relief or happiness which in that moment we long for. Only engaging the loving actions with whole hearted sincerity can do that. In the months that I avoided to write my statement, a lot of compensatory pain happened, God brought many events into my life to show me that I had emotions I was not seeing within myself that were about my fears of confronting unloving actions of others in a fear of their attack or potential harm towards me.

I now wish I went ahead with submitting my statement to police earlier than when I did. Ideally 8 month earlier, which would have been 4 month after I had the initial awareness about the truth on the matter and had the internal confrontation. Four month, if I fully engaged in the emotional process, would have been enough to work through my emotions of resistance and fear and to write up my statement. The delay in my actions, caused me to spend many month in turmoil fearing what might happen when I do it. My whole year was miserable and lacked any sincere joy. I also got attacked by Igor’s family without a break and often by Igor due to him not dealing with all the pressure his family was putting on him & his own fears. While for me and Igor the actions we took in 2010 were not anything we ever would desire to engage again, what is sad, is that the other people who were involved in the event in 2010 thought that I was not serious with my intentions to disclose to police what I did and what I know, so they continued with their damaging behaviour and again got involved in drug supply and were prepared to damage many hundreds (potentially thousands) of people, they were arrested and at the moment are in jail. Had I gone ahead with my decision without a delay, the entire year could have been different not only for myself and Igor, but also for the other people I mention.

The things I mention went on for the most part of 2016. That year, I had many amazing experiences, many opportunities to enjoy, play, but most of them I couldn’t embrace with an open heart, since I was so preoccupied with my issues and delaying dealing with them. Once I properly engaged in the process I started to feel the freedom in my chest, no matter what the outcome was going to be. Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling harsh towards myself about these specific issues, and finally could feel God’s gentle care for me.

On the day of going forward to police more fears came up which I could not feel beforehand. The outcome of this big day was very positive, police was not interested to prosecute us but kept our statements on file. I felt relieved and a little confused since out of all scary scenarios I imagined (fears), the one I was scared to have more faith in, came out to be true. Every step of this chain of engagement was an opportunity for the new lot of stored up emotions to come up to be felt.

I am learning, that it is important to start seeing every event in our life as a help from God to get rid of our painful restricting junk. And if we engaged emotionally, maybe we could save ourselves the need for the repetition of unpleasant events for the third, sixth, tenth time in order to release our pains fully.

I’ve learnt that God is good. In every way, not just for some people but not others. For everyone. Which is hard to contemplate for me, but I can see it in my life and when I deconstruct the story I describe here, I see that God was good to me, to Igor and to everyone involved. God was fair, and loving. God’s Laws are more powerful than human laws and I can have faith in that. We all can. We can have faith that when we are sincere and long to love even from a place of complete darkness, God will provide all the ways for us to grab that rope and pull ourselves out.

My current understanding is that I have not felt through the reasons that caused me to take the unloving actions which triggered this story, and I have only engaged in feeling some of the emotions that are the effects of my actions. In other words, my fear of going to jail, terror of being punished, fear of taking responsibility, fear of disclosing myself, while some of these are actual fears from my childhood, many of these emotions are effects of my actions and need to be felt, but they are not the cause. So in my first post, I mention that I started to recognise some of the reasons I took the actions, but I haven’t felt through them fully or gone much further. The key is to continue to engage.

The moral of my story here is to hopefully to inspire someone to not listen to fear, and not to delay loving actions once you know what Love would do, it is important to continue engaging in the emotional process to get there. I know a few people who have engaged in the similar process, and some are dealing with the emotions of fear and resistance I describe above, I look forward to hearing about their experiences.

Living transparently means living honestly. I can see that all of my life I avoided to do this in all aspects of my life, with friends, family, work, school, my husband but most shocking with myself. In 2016 & 2017 I took the first steps in many areas of my life to be more honest and more transparent. I can say that I have made some progress which makes me proud, but I still resist to wear my whole heart on the sleeve, as Jesus often inspires everyone to do, so my engagement in this process of facing my resistances continues. It is a process of growth.

I am currently learning, that it is only when I take actions based on truth and/or love, I build faith in God and God’s Goodness & Love for me, for each one of us.

I am preparing another post with details from the experience of working through fears and resistances relating to the same experience. The next post was initially an email to a friend, but I hope it can assist somebody else.

Lena

p.s Thanks to photographers on Pexels for their lovely collection of free images.